Spatial Discovery

A private grant was awarded to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to study the challenges and strategies that libraries and researchers face in trying to discover research data on diverse platforms and in a variety of environments. The research is being carried out in a collaboration between the UCSB Library and the Center for Spatial Studies. The desired outcome of this Spatial Discovery project is to (1) develop and test a technical protocol enabling researchers to easily identify spatial data located across disparate web-accessible databases, repositories, and catalogs; and (2) to promote the evolution of the spatial university through expanded awareness of and adoption of spatial data and analysis in research and teaching. The resulting one-stop discovery mechanism will be suitable as a primary web-delivered search tool capable of functioning within a research data cloud, as well as a resource within institutional discovery frameworks. In addition, the Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory will promote increased integration of spatially-framed instructional and research activities across disciplines through targeted collaborative programming and outreach.

In the first phase of this project, a Spatial Discovery Specialist Meeting was held in Santa Barbara on June 17-18, 2015. A report of this meeting has been published, detailing key methods and issues related to spatial discovery. A second expert meeting, Spatial Discovery Specialist Meeting II, was convened in Santa Barbara on May 11-12, 2017. Preliminary results of the project were shared with meeting participants. Discussions informed the project’s current research direction. A third expert meeting is currently being planned for the spring of 2019.

To date, the project has worked with campus faculty to create an interdisciplinary open data discovery site that showcases campus research. The project has also experimented with a linked data interface for the site that triplifies research object metadata and links data to publications. The Spatial Discovery Project is now experimenting with spatial discovery of non-spatial data. It is prototyping several spatializations of campus research, including a self-organizing map of UCSB theses and dissertations.

The vision for Spatial Discovery at UCSB in the coming year includes partnering with Esri, along with other university research libraries, to launch a Hub site, integrating spatial campus data through the UCSB Library’s Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory. The project also plans to link spatial research data shared through UCSB’s new Data Collective with other campus repositories, like eScholarship, ultimately making campus-affiliated research more spatially discoverable.